Well, would be useful for me at least.
I wouldn't need to render a sub project in order to include it in another project.

Processes can communicate with each other in many instances.

Consider Forge and Vegas interaction, or changes in models in Lightwave Modeler being reflected immediately in Layout when using the Hub. Think about media in Vegas going offline and being re-rendered by another instance of Vegas that the user has instantiated.

This isn't to say that we are doing this in Vegas, but merely addresses the assumed technical limitations of multi-process workflows.

I believe that semi-automatic handling of the multi-instance workflow is what Nat is asking for, and, though the work would not be trivial (not even close), it would not be technically impossible.

Nat,
I'm on par with your nested timeline/projects idea. This is the same thing I've been describing and using my midi sequencer as an example because,. this is exactly how my midi sequencer does this. Ins and outs are maintained on a per event basis. The thing is you don't have to worry about the INS, only the outs when an event is on the master project timeline in a nested state. It's once you click on the event and open it in a seperate Vegas track view window, then you need to connect those INs to their proper source and then this disable the INs in the master project layout. This is exactly what I suggested for Acid, but we got folder tracks instead, which have a seperate beneficial use.

To make this happen you don't necessarily need to open a seperate instance of Vegas. You could just open a seperate "Track view window." This would be beneficial because now the master project is working with a COPY of the original Vegas project you placed on the timeline, therefore when you make changes in the seperate track view editor it doesn't alter your original saved .VEG project and no seperate SAVE function would be needed that would have to....ONE save the changes to the original file, then....TWO update the changes in the Master project file in which the project is embeded. My method cuts the time in half and we skip right to step TWO and your original .VEG projects stay intact.

OK, its "not technically impossible"... neither is walking up the side of the Sears Tower like Spider Man, but I wouldn't want to do it or invest the time or resouces to accomplish it. I would much prefer the programming team address "missing" features/tools that would benefit a greater audience rather than chasing after methods to do things different ways that can already be done.

In other words "fixing" what's missing should have the priority.

Couple ideas off the top of my head:

1. color picker eyedropper that reports RGB values with Color Corrector
2. graph grid marks (similar to Photoshop's curves) for Color Curves.

"I would much prefer the programming team address "missing" features/tools that would benefit a greater audience "

I agree, if we had to chose one or the other, I would rather see 1.)Rewire Host. 2.)VST effects 3.)CDtext 4.) ASIO Direct Monitoring 5.) Tempo change marker support like Acid and 6.) A full functional Midi sequencer solution

Billy : Premiere Pro, FCP, Avid, they all have nested projects and I think users like them a lot and use them.
So I would call this a missing feature.

Don't forget nested timelines is one of the most requested feature right now...

What is "missing" is more in the eyes of the beholder, and the software engineers may or may not agree adding Feature X or Y is as impotant as feature Z. Just because another application does X, doesn't mean Vegas should or has to. Opinons (what we're talking about) of course are colored by one's work flow. Personally I don't want to muddy things and have endless nested this or that, to my way of working its just gets in the way and muddies the water. Others view may differ, which of course doesn't make any one person's ideas better or worse than the next guy's ideas. I just hope that has Vegas evolves it doesn't get bloated with so many "features" that it becomes sluggish or less intuitive. That would be a shame.

Great ideas Nat! You got my "unmudded" vote - Grazie

I now and then dropped my opinion on nested timelines. I worked with this feature back in the past and I really loved it on complex and on long projects. It is a great help for organizing! From my side - not a whish because other NLE has it but a whish because I see the benefit this feature can provide for editing.
On the other hand - I think nested timelines is something very complicated regarding programming. The more because of the reach-featured Vegas timeline facilities. So having a nested timelineline feature is a great big desire of mine but I don't want to get it for any price. Though to me it would be worth more than any cool compositing fx. Editing in first place. Vegas isn't missing that much here, but there are still some missing links like nested timelines and a kind of storyboarding. Before I get any more FX stuff I'd love to see some progress which concentrates on editing which I think is the heart of Vegas.

Marco

Nested timelines are very useful for the editor who makes his living doing video, especially long form. Long form more or less requires nested timelines, and it also allows multiple people to be working on various aspects of a project. In ACID, while they're not "nested timelines" it's a nice feature to be able to remix songs by dropping the media from one project into another project. In AE and Premiere, this is one of the best "new" features, IMO. I like it in FCP, too. Build a composite in one place, have someone working on tweaking it over the network, drop it into a project sequence in FCP, no rendering, but you've got it. It's definitely a feature a majority of users have requested. I'm sure it's a programming nightmare though.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1264767,00.asp Nesting selected as a top feature

http://reviews.cnet.com/Adobe_Premiere_Pro_1_5/4514-3670_7-30854021.html nesting selected as a top feature

http://www.macintouch.com/finalcutrvw.html nesting selected as a top feature.

In Vegas, we already have nesting, but it's a compositing model, where one parent can control several children. This a HUGE benefit. Having it work with Avid, FCP, Automatic Duck, Premiere, After Effects, and other apps is very useful as you work on sequences, packages, or long form projects.

"Nested timelines are very useful for the editor who makes his living doing video"

Sorry, but I view this as an unnecessary comment on your side Spot, so I hope it wasn't put there to take a jab at someone.

Nested timelines are also very useful for the editor who doesn't make his living doing video. It's also very useful, for a person that does audio, as I've pointed out. I've used this feature in my midi sequencer Studio Vision and find it very useful to shuffle and arrange seperate complex parts of Intro,Verse,Chorus,Bridge etc. and it allows me to take a complex project consisting of many tracks and place it all on 1 track, where I'm able to focus in more on the arrangement and not be burdened with having to select 32 seperate tracks to make a simple arrangement or duration change. So yes, I love the idea of a nested timeline and have many uses for it, and no I don't edit video for a living but if I did, I would find it very useful for that also.

I was trying to avoid using the word "Professional" because everytime I do, I get poked at for using it. I think it's useful in the audio world too, but saying
"Nested timelines are very useful for the editor who makes his living doing video or the producer/editor that works in a recording studio" seemed very long. I should have just used the word "Professional" because avoiding it caused someone's hair to get stiff anyway.
No matter what I say, seems like I've always got a shadow there to piss on it. It gets old.

Just some words of advice because, I understand the rope you're trying to walk. Instead of using the term "professional" or someone who does this type of thing for a living, since this automatically qualifies you as a "professional" by the pure definition of the term. You may want to describe more HOW the professional would use this. In other words, someone who has many pre existing assembled video edits, that they regularly use in different projects, could find this useful. Sure does sound a lot more friendly to me, and gives me a better idea how I would use it if I wasn't a professional.

Um, correct me if I'm wrong, but I did describe a workflow in my previous post. Nevertheless, like I said, when it comes to a couple people here in the forum, it doesn't matter what words I use, I'm gonna get hassled one way or another.

http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=369498&Page=0

"But I don't know how a professional might use it."

You are one touchy SOB aren't you? Oh well, I'll digress in trying to point out how playing the professional card sometimes makes you sound more like a pompous ass rather than a "professional". I think we're all here to learn and help one another out in these forums and I could care less who is a "professional" or not. Honestly, I've probably learned more from users that are non professionals newbies because they sometimes use things in ways outside of the professional norm that I would have not thought of. Thanks, for sharing the background workflow none the less, I just wish it could have come without the sarcasm.

Hmm... when I was very into web design years ago when it first arrived on the scene I made a nice income designing web sites. Back then there was a bunch in CIWAH and elsewhere that insisted that you're weren't very "professional" unless you used Notepad or some other text based application to write your HTML markup. Any WYSIWYG* editor was for girly-men and it wasn't "manly" to go that route. LOL!

Its seems a few here have the reverse opinion for video editing. Unless you do X, the message you're sending if you mean to or not is that you are more "professional" than someone that doesn't do it the way you do.

Funny but true story:

In the 70's when I was an accountant/auditor I worked for a medium sized company and my immediate superior was the company controller. A nice enough guy, smart, good natured, but he had a horrible habit of just having to announce every time he met anybody new, at the office, outside the office, at gatherings, restaurants, everywhere, he would say hi, I'm Joe R..... I'm a MBA. True, it was more rare back in the 70's then today, but Joe needing to always mention it had the reverse effect then what he thought. Instead of impressing people,. almost everyone meeting him thought that he was a pompous self-important jackass for saying it. You know what they say about first impressions. Joe simply never made a good one.

I think of of that every time the same couple guys need to trot out the "I'm a professional" card one more time.

Hint: If you' are a professional, then start acting like it. No real professional walks around announcing he's a professional. When you meet a doctor he doesn't say he went to medical school. When you meet an attorney he doesn't say he went to law school. I know of no one outside this forum that's into video work or any other field that looks for ways to inject, hey, I'm a "professional". Its so bush league. Besides, there has got to be hundreds, maybe thousands of professionals that visit this forum. Only a couple have some silly need to anounce that they are professional, over and over which in my book makes them anything but professional. I bet I'm not the only one that thinks that.

WYSIWYG = what you see is what you get. For HTML a application like Dreamweaver where you see within the application, not an exact but a rough markup of the HTML you wrote. Anyone using such an application in the early days was vilifed in part because early version of such application would make "tag soup" out of some markup.